Body Shots

LUST AND TRUST

Body Shots

BODY SHOTS: comedy-drama. With Sean Patrick Flanery, Amanda Peet, Jerry O’Connell, Sybil Temchen, Tara Reid, Emily Proctor, Ron Livingston, Brad Rowe. Music by Mark Isham. Written by David McKenna. Directed by Michael Cristofer.

POSTHOC RATING: ***

Body Shots, is a new sleek comedy drama about a group of eight twenty-something L.A. Yuppies in search of love and sex while out on the town. Before you click to the next page let me say it’s actually a good movie. It’s one that’s really about sex and sexuality. It doesn’t exploit it for adolescent titillation. It may turn off those who hate anything about a group universally despised by most people outside Los Angeles. The rest of us will find an American Pie for grown-ups. (I.e.: no one makes love to the dessert). My opinion may be a lonely one. A film that takes a sympathetic look at Yuppies is about as likely to get good press as one about honest, hard-working politicians. A stereotype is a safe place to hide.

The film opens with Rick (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Jane (Amanda Peet) chastely awakening in bed together one very early morning, fully clothed, after a hard night partying. Before they can finish what they started, in staggers Jane’s friend Sara (Tara Reid) escaping from what she alleges to be a rape by Rick’s football star friend Michael (Jerry O’Connell). Rick and Jane are both lawyers, Rick a defense attorney, Jane a public prosecutor. And so from almost falling into each other’s arms, they find themselves squaring off over the incident.

From here, the film returns to the night before and follows the events leading up to the incident from multiple perspectives, as we’ve seen in classics like Rashomon and Citizen Kane. Though, it must be said, its narrow focus keeps it from being as good.

Though the eight, four men, four women, are Yuppies their situation becomes more absorbing as the film goes along. It doesn’t waste time obviously savaging the empty materialist lifestyle. Its focus is on sex in all its tangled, messy and, sometimes dangerous, glory. Their thoughts and feelings about it pour out of them like a geyser.

But, poignantly, instead of pouring out to each other, they pour out to us, straight from the screen. This technique, which we’ve seen many times, can put you off fast, smacking of art school pretentiousness. “Talk to each other! Not us!” I scrawled in my notebook. But later I realized that was all they could do. The technique works as an expression of their loneliness. Their real feelings are too explosive to openly share with each other. For all their camaraderie, they hardly know each other at all. So they turn to us. We become their confessors and so, it’s implied, we must forgive.

This is not a film for fundamental moralists, but its concerns are moral. Thanks to Michael Cristofer’s sympathetic direction and David McKenna’s (American History X) script, Body Shots never takes a superior tone to its characters (ala Alan Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A., one of the few films I’ve walked out on). With a cool sympathy and comic affection it watches their tentative, anxious and frustrated groping for union, both physical and emotional. The characters may sometimes be crass, but the film refuses to sneer. Watching these four couples move together and then push apart other away is like watching two opposite magnetic poles trying to force themselves together.

Especially notable is Rodrigo Garcia’s exceptional cinematography. He gives nighttime Los Angeles an icy blue tone that reflects and deepens the isolation of the characters. One astonishing aerial shot shows an artery of traffic moving through the city amid the darkness, with blood red taillights pulling away on one side, while headlights move towards us in a smooth white line on the other. It makes very clear just how lonely a place like L.A. can be.

As Body Shots sees it men and women may have more in common than thought. Both sides talk exuberantly dirty among their respective groups, the women more so. But, wild and passionate as their feelings are, they lack the glue of trust. While sex is as easy as plucking oranges off a tree, without trust they learn that love remains forever elusive. And it’s things like Michael’s alleged rape of Sara that keep it that way.

In the end what happened between Michael and Sara becomes a matter of “he said, she said”. We’re left to make up our own minds about what actually happened. While the barriers to sex fall easily, the barriers to the union they all seek remain strong and high.

The performances are uniformly fine, except for Tara Reid as Sara who seems awkward, tentative and on the surface. Jerry O’Connell is excellent as Michael the football star, a brawling, loud-mouthed gorilla one moment, then a cowering animal the next when he realizes the cage he’s put himself in. Ron Livingston as Trent, the group’s number one loser, whose idea of evening dress is golf pants, makes a hilarious dork. He’s reminiscent of Vince Vaughn’s Trent in Swingers, except where Vaughn played a psychopath triumphant, this Trent is a pathetic loser who manages to get lucky with Whitney (a slyly knowing performance by Emily Proctor) in a scene that shows that some women know how to take the upper hand. Sybil Temchen is winsomely enigmatic and sexy as hard-drinking Emma whose alley encounter with the supposedly honorable and sensitive Shawn (Brad Rowe) constitutes one of the more harrowing turn-ons. That scene perfectly captures both the gritty appeal and the awkward consequences of those anonymous encounters that are the stuff of fantasy. This film is not afraid to say sex is gloriously fun, while not forgetting its larger ethical context.

In the end, trust is broken all around, not only between men and women, but also among them. The fault lines split them all apart. They’re all left alone with their own private questions. Even Rick and Jane, who get so close, find they’re forced to turn away, in the final closing shot. Still the film doesn’t feel pessimistic. There’s still, somehow, a glimmer of hope among the sadness.

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